ch3-4 done

chapters/book1/ch01-draft.md

@@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ I knew what they were for, or rather, what you could do with them if you were in
 
 I was re-shelving a crate of dried silkweed when I noticed the ward-jar on the third shelf was doing it again.
 
-(Third ring off-axis. Resonance gap between second and third anchors. Moisture seepage through the preservation field at roughly the speed of patience. Moonpetal chalk by month's end. Artificer blames storage. Gavren eats the cost. Customer gets expensive dust.)
+(*Third ring off-axis. Resonance gap between second and third anchors. Moisture seepage through the preservation field at roughly the speed of patience. Moonpetal chalk by month's end. Artificer blames storage. Gavren eats the cost. Customer gets expensive dust.*)
 
 I moved the jar to a higher shelf where the air was drier. It wouldn't fix the flaw — not my job — but it would slow the decay enough that the product would sell before it mattered.
 
@@ -50,7 +50,7 @@ Seventh bell. Open for business.
 
 I leaned against the counter —
 
-(Eleven coppers. Shaved half-silver, probably not worth a full half. Two meals if honest, three if creative. Same as this morning. Same as yesterday. The arithmetic hadn't changed. The habit was load-bearing.)
+(*Eleven coppers. Shaved half-silver, probably not worth a full half. Two meals if honest, three if creative. Same as this morning. Same as yesterday. The arithmetic hadn't changed. The habit was load-bearing.*)
 
 — and waited for the day to start being something other than this.
 
@@ -60,7 +60,7 @@ The morning rush, such as it was, arrived in the predictable sequence of human n
 
 First through the door: a dockworker with a bruised shoulder and the particular squint of a man who'd been told by his wife to see a healer and had decided, independently, that a jar of something from a shelf would be cheaper and involve fewer questions about how he'd been injured.
 
-(Bruised shoulder, left side. Carried something heavy and twisted. Not the first time — the calluses said dock work, the squint said wife sent him. Wedding band, copper, worn thin. Arnica salve, second shelf. In and out.)
+(*Bruised shoulder, left side. Carried something heavy and twisted. Not the first time — the calluses said dock work, the squint said wife sent him. Wedding band, copper, worn thin. Arnica salve, second shelf. In and out.*)
 
 He was correct on both counts. I pointed him toward the arnica salve, he grunted in a way that passed for gratitude among people who carried things for a living, and he was gone in under two minutes. Efficient. I appreciated efficiency in customers the way I appreciated it in plumbing — when it worked, you didn't have to think about it.
 
@@ -112,7 +112,7 @@ I noticed all of this in approximately two seconds, which was unusual. I noticed
 
 My process — the automatic, near-involuntary cold read I ran on every person who walked through a door — engaged the way it always did.
 
-(Posture: confident, not performed. Clothing: practical, well-maintained, not expensive. Hands: no rings, short nails, callus on right index finger — writing or detailed manual work. Eyes: scanning, not browsing. Already knows what she's here for. Cataloguing the rest while she locates it.)
+(*Posture: confident, not performed. Clothing: practical, well-maintained, not expensive. Hands: no rings, short nails, callus on right index finger — writing or detailed manual work. Eyes: scanning, not browsing. Already knows what she's here for. Cataloguing the rest while she locates it.*)
 
 All of this was normal. Data. The kind of behavioral surface I could read on anyone in a room and use to predict their next three decisions with reasonable accuracy.
 
@@ -180,7 +180,7 @@ I rang up the binding salts and the silverthorn, wrote the transaction in the le
 
 I noticed it anyway.
 
-(Warmth. Brief. She didn't pull away faster than necessary. Didn't linger either — no data there. But the absence of avoidance. The neutral duration. Was that a signal or the lack of one? Baseline: most people retract. She didn't. Deviation from norm or absence of norm? Insufficient sample size. One interaction. One touch. Meaningless. Noted anyway. Filed under —)
+(*Warmth. Brief. She didn't pull away faster than necessary. Didn't linger either — no data there. But the absence of avoidance. The neutral duration. Was that a signal or the lack of one? Baseline: most people retract. She didn't. Deviation from norm or absence of norm? Insufficient sample size. One interaction. One touch. Meaningless. Noted anyway. Filed under —*)
 
 *Stop it,* I told myself. I was reading subtext into a woman who didn't have subtext. If she hadn't pulled away, it was because there was no reason to pull away, and assigning meaning to the absence of avoidance was exactly the kind of pattern-matching error I spent my life not making.
 
@@ -234,7 +234,7 @@ I locked up and stepped into the evening.
 
 Drenwick at dusk was tolerable. The light did something to the river that made it look like it belonged in a better city, and the noise from the docks softened into a background hum that my brain could file away without processing. I walked the route I always walked — south along the quay, past the chandler's and the net-mender's, through the gap in the old customs wall —
 
-(Two bricks missing. Load-bearing? No — decorative course. Gap hadn't widened in the three years I'd been using it. Mortar on the adjacent bricks still sound. Someone had removed them deliberately, not knocked them out. Interesting. Irrelevant. Filed.)
+(*Two bricks missing. Load-bearing? No — decorative course. Gap hadn't widened in the three years I'd been using it. Mortar on the adjacent bricks still sound. Someone had removed them deliberately, not knocked them out. Interesting. Irrelevant. Filed.*)
 
 — where no one had bothered to repair the gap because the only thing on the other side was scrub grass and a path that led to the part of the waterfront where rent was cheap enough that someone like me could afford to exist.
 
@@ -244,13 +244,13 @@ The shack itself was one room, which was generous if you considered it a sleepin
 
 The workshop was the thing. Not the house — houses were shelter, and shelter was solvable. The workshop was where the actual work would happen. The work I was meant to be doing, if I could ever get far enough past the arithmetic of survival to start.
 
-I spread the drawings on the table, which I did most evenings, not because I needed to review them but because looking at them was the closest thing I had to faith. Four rooms. A workshop with ventilation and proper warding anchors built into the foundation. A main room large enough to not feel like a shack. A bedroom. And a second bedroom that existed in the plans for reasons I had not articulated to anyone, including myself, but which had appeared in revision six and survived every subsequent draft without being questioned.
+I spread the drawings on the table, which I did most evenings, not because I needed to review them but because looking at them was the closest thing I had to faith. Five rooms. A workshop with ventilation and proper warding anchors built into the foundation. A main room large enough to not feel like a shack. A bedroom. A kitchen — which, embarrassingly, hadn't appeared until revision four, because apparently I'd been planning to sustain myself on determination and ambient river moisture. And a bathroom, added in revision six. Why it took me six revisions to understand that a person needs a place to bathe and relieve themselves, I'll never know, but it's there now.
 
 Twelve coppers and a shaved half-silver.
 
 The house needed approximately eight hundred silvers in materials alone.
 
-(Eight hundred for materials. Sixty for permits. Two hundred minimum for warding work if done by a licensed artificer, one-forty if I sourced the anchors myself and contracted just the inscription. Labor: three hundred if hired, less if I did the framing. Total: thirteen hundred, give or take. Current savings: twelve coppers and a shaved half-silver. Time to break ground at current rate of accumulation: forty years. Margin of error: irrelevant when the number starts with forty.)
+(*Eight hundred for materials. Sixty for permits. Two hundred minimum for warding work if done by a licensed artificer, one-forty if I sourced the anchors myself and contracted just the inscription. Labor: three hundred if hired, less if I did the framing. Total: thirteen hundred, give or take. Current savings: twelve coppers and a shaved half-silver. Time to break ground at current rate of accumulation: forty years. Margin of error: irrelevant when the number starts with forty.*)
 
 At my current rate of savings — which was not a rate so much as a theoretical concept, like perpetual motion or honest politics — I would be able to break ground in roughly forty years, give or take the occasional windfall or catastrophe.
 
@@ -274,6 +274,6 @@ I wouldn't ask her out. The math was clear, even if the rest wasn't. I was a she
 
 I put the drawings away, ate my one honest meal — bread, hard cheese, an apple that was optimistic about its own freshness — and lay on the cot listening to the river do the thing it did at night, which was exist loudly and without consideration for people trying to sleep.
 
-The second bedroom stayed in the plans. I didn't think about why.
+The plans stayed on the table. Nine revisions and counting.
 
 I thought about crystal density, and golden hair, and the particular way she'd said *simple deduction* without irony, and I fell asleep annoyed at a woman whose name I didn't know for reasons I couldn't quantify, which was — if I was being honest, and I was usually honest — not a bad way to end a day that had otherwise been entirely about counting coppers.